I'm pleased to announce I have been invited as a guest artist to participate in my first exhibition of 2017, Fully Awake at blip blip blip in Leeds, 6th - 21st April. Part of Teaching Painting: an organisation, formed at Manchester School Of Art in 2015, whose remit is to investigate the teaching of contemporary painting practices within art schools.

The entire exhibition cycle is in five parts (5 venues) and will eventually involve 180 artists, and run over a two-year period. The exhibition at blip blip blip will include 36 works. The following 12 artists have agreed to exhibit work and each invited an additional two ‘guest’ artists to exhibit work alongside them.

A roaming exhibition, throughout Whitstable town centre and the seafront, displaying artworks on T-shirts worn by Repeater Collective. Due to the high demand of physical space, the group has taken it upon themselves, quite literally, to offer artists the chance to show their work in this Satellite event alongside the Whitstable Biennale. This gives artists the chance to get their work seen by a new audience where they otherwise might not be able to.

The collective has invited artists and curated a collection of seven artworks to be shown on rotation throughout the one-day event during the Bienniale. While wandering throughout the seafront and town, Biennale visitors will be offered fold-out printed posters entailing the full list of artists’ works involved, with the title, medium and year of each work listed, along with the event details.

I'm pleased to announce that my painting, Happy Faces Allowed has been selected for the Oriel Davies Open 2016 : Painting show.

Multiple Artists - 16 April 2016 - 15 June 2016"The call for entries last Autumn generated an overwhelming response and after a challenging selection process for the judging panel we can reveal a superb line up of work by thirty two artists (a third of whom are currently based in Wales). The selection panel included Clare Woods, a leading international artist who had a large solo show at Oriel Davies in 2014 and subsequent Welsh tour (2015-2016); Nick Thornton, Head of Fine Art at Amgueddfa Cymru - National Museum Wales, Cardiff; Dr Rebecca Daniels, Art Historical Researcher, Catalogue Raisonné of Francis Bacon and Alex Boyd Jones, Curator at Oriel Davies.

These artists present new and recent work that reflects the multiplicity of painting; whether abstract or figurative, representational or imagined. The scale, material and presentation varies enormously for example some works are created through mechanical intervention over a period of time while others require the viewer to move physically around them.

As we might imagine the work can be seen to be a reflection of our time, whether referring to the past and our understanding of it, the virtual worlds we operate in more frequently, the human psyche or our ongoing relationship with our physical environment. As viewers in a show like this we see dialogues, influences, the political and the social as well as a reflection of ourselves."

‘Wearing Trousers’ collects together emerging and established female artists based in and around Thanet. Historically, women were prohibited from wearing trousers, both in legal and in societal terms. It was as recent as 2013 that a bylaw that prevented women from wearing trousers was lifted in Paris. This issue offers as a point from which to consider prohibitions that women have had to face, and are still facing in everyday pursuits, including the history of the conditions for female artists. Whilst not being grouped to satisfy a particular theme, the works in the show contribute to a wider conversation around the position that women occupy in the creative arts today.

The Art Car Boot Fair | Margate Edition with Turner ContemporarySupported by Vauxhall Motors and the Arts Council of EnglandSunday August 30, 12-4pm, £3

This August bank holiday the whole of Margate will be sizzling with art, screenings, roller coasters, cool café’s, packed restaurants and bars, there’ll be Kent Pride in the streets, Sink the Pink revving up the nightlife at Dreamland, art installations, music and for four delicious hours the Art Car Boot Fair | Margate Edition will take over Turner Contemporary’s car park and deliver a fun, frivolity filled afternoon packed with serious art bargains...where else could you pick up a just-for-the-day edition by Tracey Emin AND play Pin the Tiara on Edvard Munchs ‘Scream’. Talking of screaming we’re hoping to present the ‘Be-drag-gled Parade’ and some knitted swimwear on the side...hot dogs, black dogs, cool hounds, lots of originals, special editions, five minute portraits, art on a (seaside) postcard and art you can make yourself – bring your kids, your wallets and your dogs and let your hair down. Come on down – you won’t be disappointed!

Launched this year the Griffin Gallery Open is a new initiative to encourage all artists in painting and drawing. It aims to reward innovation, skill and commitment to practice. The judges, Ian Davenport, Nigel Hurst and Becca Pelly-Fry have selected 98 works of art to be exhibited at Griffin Gallery by 92 artists.

Room for Negotiation is an exhibition concerned with spatial relationships, interdisciplinary practices, and the negotiation of space itself. It brings together the works of James Collins, Katya Derksen, Luke Godfrey, and Hannah Weatherhead. Drawing influence from increasingly overlapping fields of art, architecture, technology, (etc.), and their associated practices, itexplores a sense of “spatial negotiation” by looking at the exhibition as a type of medium. A diverse yet interrelated set of works ranging from paintings to sculptures, installations, architectural models and site-specific interventions occupy the gallery, having evolved through a playful curatorial process.

With differences in form and approach, the works all discuss in some way a sense of preoccupation with how space is encountered and translated through layered creative processes. Together they evoke questions about viewing - the physical and visual experience, and conceptually navigating oneself through a space (be it of the gallery, a picture plane or of one’s own practice) - and about the act itself of looking, defining and understanding.

The titlemakes reference to the functional elements of the gallery space and the discursive approach that has driven the construction of the show. It also refers to the increasing elasticity of definitions such as ‘painting’, ‘sculpture’, ‘drawing’ (etc) within contemporary practice, and the subsequent potential that lies in adopting such unprescriptive approaches to production and curating.

Dot will be in the group show POP LIVING at the Schwartz Gallery, London from 11.02.15 – 28.02.2015. Curated by Ismail Erbil.

Conceptual Pop. Conceptual Living. Pop Living invites artists to submit work that builds on ideas of ‘pop’ thinking in art and culture; the re/production of culture and living mediated through technology and advertising is captured in a constant techno-documentation of society and the self. The hyper-real and contemporary constructions of living come together in a celebrity-fuelled world of sleek design and fictional future-spaces. Pop Living invites artists working with wall based work to respond to concepts of contemporary living, hyper-reality and transmitted spaces.